Festival Season

Pashupatinath

I attended a couple huge Hindu festivals this month.  It seems that there's almost always a festival or other holy day.  Nepal is home to some of the most important Hindu and Buddhist pilgrimage sites, and some of the biggest temples.

Swasthani Puja

This festival is celebrated for an entire month, honouring the goddess Saraswati, and heralding the coming spring.  Saraswati is also the goddess of knowledge, with this festival encouraging people to donate books and educational materials.  It is also the start of the school year at many institutions.

I took my second trip to Sankhu - this time not while injured on the back of a stranger's motorcycle - on the last and most intense day of this festival.  I took a local bus, which took over an hour to get just part way up the hill to Sankhu.  As the bus came to a screeching halt, I managed to peer around some of the other passengers to see out the window and saw that the whole road was one big traffic jam.  So, I had to choose between another hour or three stuck on an unmoving bus, or walk the rest of the way to the town.  It turned out it was only another half hour to walk, and I ended up meeting a lovely young lady and her mother, who ended up being my sort of tour guides.  I was the ONLY foreigner in the whole place.  

The town was packed.  We wandered through the streets to find some of their family members and then slowly made our way down to the river.  My wonderful guides took me down to where people were bathing in the river, and some women had been doing a sort of fast for the month.  They showed me how to do the cleansing with the water and we received blessings from the holy men.  I was given all sorts of strange sweets to eat, and didn't get sick from any of it.

We eventually found our way back through the fray and attempted to catch a few overflowing buses.

Shoulda taken the truck instead.

There was finally a bus with a little bit of room, so we jumped aboard.  About 10 minutes down the winding road people start getting sick out the windows.  It was so hot and so crammed and such a sickening drive.  My young companion had to actually get the driver to stop and get off to be sick.  She was grey for the rest of the ride.  I'm done with buses for a while.

Maha Shivaratri

On February 17 was another one of the biggest Hindu festivals.  Maha Shivaratri, the "night of Shiva", worships Shiva with fasting, offerings, an all night vigil, prayer, and many people will visit temples and take part in other rituals.  Pilgrims from all over will wait hours and hours to get into the main temple.  It is believed that Shiva is able to take away any negative energy and help with a fresh start to the year.

Line to inner sanctum.

I went to Shivaratri with our volunteer coordinator, and somehow he used the magic touch to get us VIP entrance into Pashupatinath.  It is *the* Hindu temple.  People come from all over to visit this place.  Non-Hindus are not allowed into the inner sanctum, but I still got to tour all around the main area.  It is also a huge cremation site, so we got to watch some traditional funeral rites as well.  The juxtaposition of the insanity of this place against the starkness of a row of dead bodies was really jarring.  It's all out in the open.

THIS IS WHAT A MILLION PEOPLE LOOKS LIKE

Actually, it's really difficult to get a photo at these events, as you're so squished between all of humanity and it's pretty scary taking out your camera.  But you get the idea.  We got in trouble for standing on this bridge too long.

I'm looking forward to visiting Pashupatinath on a regular day, to explore more of the gigantic complex and learn about more of the ceremonies that go on there.

Bouda

After Pashupatinath, Puran decided to take me to visit Boudhanath, which I also had not seen yet.  Similar to Swayambunath, the Monkey Temple, it is a huge Buddhist temple, or stupa.  We actually got to walk on the white part.  It's hard to show how massive these structures actually are.  The stupas are still active places of Buddhist practice, with people performing meditation and prayer, and the perimeter of the area is lined with many small monasteries.  Along with the usual trinket and souvenir shops.

Every tourist has a billion of these photos.

I'm learning a lot about how these stupas and holy places are all interconnected, and how the ancient layout of the original kingdoms in Nepal worked.  It's all really fascinating.

Round head by a round thing.

We walked all around the thing and enjoyed lunch at a Tibetan restaurant.  Boudha is a neat area that I'm looking forward to exploring more.  There are a lot of districts within the city and the entire Kathmandu valley.

Not a bad view over lunch.

I don't know how or when it happened, but I'm finally getting used to and getting into the rhythm of this place.  I think it caters to my general high energy and need for a challenge.  I've met my match :)

The Passenger is Under the Bus

These kids are crazy.

I've been volunteering at Sanga-Sangai School for over two months now, and I'm completely in love with these little people.  There are definitely some big differences in attitude and behaviour of kids here.  Teachers and adults get a ton of respect, and kids are more than happy to do their schoolwork and help with housekeeping tasks.  The cultural expectations are different in Nepal.  I'm not saying they're always angels - kids will be kids - but they tend to be so, so appreciative and enthusiastic most of the time.  You are never alone in Nepal.  There's a lack of privacy, but the inverse is also true.  There's always someone there for you, and everyone is always there for each other.

We usually do some English reading and writing first thing every morning.  One day we were doing an exercise on prepositions (on, in, under, etc.) and one student thought that it was correct to write "The passenger is under the bus."  After a lot of pantomime and explanation they thought it was HILARIOUS, and now they like to act it out for me all the time.

Reading in English.  Always a group effort.

Lunch play time is usually designated to free play or football, and I've recently introduced them to ballroom dancing.  We've been practising basic waltz steps - I get to be the man.  Some of the kids weigh basically nothing and are so tiny that I can sit them on my hip.

Okay, and I'm going to totally brag here: my kids all know their solfege and my big kids can play the scale on their recorders.  Kids here seem to have a really good memory and pick things up very quickly.  They love repetition and will sing their songs allllll day long.  We've been learning Tomorrow from Annie and it's pretty much the most adorable thing you've ever heard.  They are singing in rounds and their pitch is getting better every day.  We are working all a cappella at the moment.  I still can't believe how fast they've learned everything.  I guess they don't have a lot of distractions.

Handing out their recorders for the first time was very exciting.  I have never seen little eyes get so big.

This photo is crazy.  They know how to hold them properly now.

 "Home, miss? Bring home?!"

"No, your recorder stays at school where we will practise." (and because we'll never see it again.)

In the week or so since we've started they've improved vastly, and are always practising air fingering while singing their Do Re Mi's.  I can't wait to get them an instrument that has all the octaves :)

This one is ALWAYS giggling.

"Miss, pink is my BEST colour." Best means favourite here.  "Miss, Krish is my best." Krish is the Indian version of Batman.  We watch the movies sometimes on movie day and they're actually really awesome.  One day we also watched Harry Potter in Hindi and spent the rest of the day colouring a giant picture of a tree.  Action movies usually lead to "Fighting? Fighting, miss?" with lots of air punching and kicking.

Reading and hearing about experiences from other volunteers, I have quickly learned that a lot of your time is spent being a babysitter, nurse, referee, and friend.  My kids are very well behaved compared to some of the horror stories I've heard.  Things are seeming to work better as I get to know the kids and my Nepali improves.

One day at lunch one of the twins comes running up to me, her hands covered in blood.  Okay, okay, calm.  Her thumb has a huge gash which she got from running into a metal part on one of the doors.  I knew where the first aid kit was so I grabbed a few things and the other kids helped her wash the wound.  There is no running water at the school.  You have to use a smaller bucket to scoop out water from the big container, and then put that into a bucket with a spot.  None of this is particularly sanitary, but we have a big bottle of disinfectant liquid so I pour that over the wound while she screams and the other children pour water over it.  It doesn't seem to need stitches so we dry and bandage as well as we can and she's set.  The next day at lunch she comes screaming and covered in blood again and has cut open another finger.  The kids know the drill so we go through the same process all over again.  I am so, so thankful for clean, running water and an abundance of bandaids back home.  Someone usually has pink eye which I've contracted once already, and though I haven't seen lice I suspect it may be there.  One of the girls in my class had to pick some kind of mite off my head and I freaked out.  It seemed to be just one.

A few days post finger cuts.

These children do not usually have access to modern electronics, so one of the goals at the school is to get them to be more technologically literate.  We are hoping to get a computer of some kind that they can learn the basics on.  I will sometimes let the older kids use my camera, which is great but usually turns into a disaster with turn taking.  They are very preoccupied with things being fair, but will always try for "one more" than the rest.

Today we learned how to take selfies!

H is "etch", there is somehow no difference between P, F, B, and V sounds, R's are rolled, "Ya miss? Noooo." generally means no, "game off" when playtime is over.  I've taught them that we don't say good morning after lunch, so now in the mornings we get both. "Namaste, Miss! How are you, miss? Good morning! Good afternoon!" It's a start.

It still astounds me how very resourceful everyone is here, and how respectful the children are.
And the best part?  I'm actually starting to UNDERSTAND what they're saying!